If I go to a restaurant and eat some food and complain that food tasted awful, I am not saying that the restaurant should be forced by the government to make good food nor am I saying that everyone is forced to eat at that restaurant. I'm simply saying that the product served to me was not good.
Similarly when someone complains about Youtube engaging in censorship, you should not interpret that to mean that Youtube is infringing on first amendment rights, or that everyone is forced to use Youtube... rather it's an argument that the product Youtube provides is not as good as it could otherwise be. People are welcome to have an opinion and discuss whether Youtube's policies improve its service or are detrimental to its service without it devolving into a discussion about legal rights and government enforcement.
You can disagree with a position about censorship and make good arguments that Youtube censoring certain content or being the arbiter of truth makes for a better product, just as you can disagree with someone about whether a restaurant serves good food... but don't change someone's argument about the quality of a product into an argument about someone being forced into something or having their rights violated since no one ever made any such claim.
Everyone already knows this... so instead of constantly bringing it up to make ourselves sound smart, let's instead actually discuss something more meaningful, such as whether the food served by the restaurant really is shitty? What reasons might a restaurant have for serving shitty food, do they perhaps gain financially from it? Would it be more effective to work with the restaurant to get them to stop serving shitty food, or would it be more effective to open up a restaurant next door that doesn't serve shitty food? What are the trade-offs?
Those are more interesting topics rather than pointing out the fact that a restaurant has the right to serve shitty food and you can't force them not to.
I think Youtube would be a better product and better serve their viewers and content creators if they didn't suspend The Hill for playing a clip of Donald Trump. My belief in this does not imply any use of force whatsoever.
You're not addressing why YouTube is blocking it or the state of it's own rights as a private platform, just making blanket moral statements about opinion.
The product is better if I am in control. YouTube ought to stay out of it. It does not know my intent. If it guesses wrong it should be criticized, just like a restaurant guessing at my food preferences and allergies.
This is a different argument.
You already have the agency of being in control, you can pick any platform to watch from. Youtube is exercising it's own right to censor, similar to how you want to censor for your kid, based on what you think is harmful.
1) Youtube hosts everything that's legal, no filters at all
2) Youtube decides what it does and doesn't host
3) Somethings are ok (e.g. news / fake news), others are not (porn). Who decides what's ok and not ok if it's not the legal system or youtube itself?
It is much more like 14th Amendment rights and the 1964 CRA enhancement of that. There are prohibitions on private organizations denying equal service based upon certain characteristics.
As Twitter, Youtube, Facebook are not actually broadcasters in any sense (what are they broadcasting?), their refusal to conduct business with others can't be cloaked in 1st amendment grounds. No one is forcing anyone to watch anything on any of these platforms.
The crux of this issue is political affiliation is not a protected class, and therefore it can be discriminated against. (And we do have non-immutable, changeable characteristics as protected classes.)
Any of 1) section 230 clarifications or changes, 2) expansions of protected classes under the 14th, or 3) monopoly regulatory power will make these prohibitions invalid.
There is a certain U.S. political party who has a persecution fetish that makes bad faith statements about their opinions needing to be protected, but I'll let you figure out which one it is.
But, the issue that people are starting to react to is - are some platforms a natural monopoly?
Is it useful to have all user-generated public video clips be aggregated by one central provider? The answer seems like it’s yes.
If there’s only gonna be one platform, or it’s socially optimal to have one platform - is it right to give control of that to one entity into perpetuity?
That a political question.
No.
> Is it useful to have all user-generated public video clips be aggregated by one central provider? The answer seems like it’s yes.
The answer is no.
Vimeo exists. Facebook and Twitter both feature user-generated video content. I hear TikTok is a thing. In addition to these platforms basically anyone can self-host in 2022. Plenty of news outlets self-host.
> If there’s only gonna be one platform, or it’s socially optimal to have one platform - is it right to give control of that to one entity into perpetuity?
You have not made the case that there should be only one platform so the second part of your statement is irrelevant.
> That a political question.
Only for people who want to say things without suffering the consequences.
Given the state of cloud computing in 2022, there has never been a time that it has been easier to host your own video streaming, so it's not a natural monopoly either.
I’m not making a case for anything - I’m explaining the narrative behind a growing POV.
But I will say that YouTube is different than Facebook videos or TikTok. YouTube is meant to be a searchable video index across topics and time. It’s a video search engine and hosting service in one.
And see, there's always a fine balance between private property rights and other rights. For example: you can't prevent people from a given ethnicity from shopping in your store, even though it is a private property and in many cases you can refuse service to a particular customer - just not for this reason. And this is perfectly okay, because private property rights aren't absolute.
There is nothing stopping Fox News/NewsMax/OAN from creating their own video hosting platform.
But regarding your question, I actually think that there's a serious dysfunction here in the way Fox News can legally spread lies that are very damaging to society with little to no legal consequence. They even alleged in a slander case that the Tucker Carlson show is actually just entertainment, and reasonable people can't expect it to be truthful - even though millions of people get their news primarily from Fox News, including Carlson talk shows, fully believing they are telling the truth.
And I see that YouTube is cracking down on a lot of the same misinformation that Fox News propagates (and sometimes, worse stuff), but my point is that this shouldn't be up to Google to decide what political talking points are or aren't allowed. YouTube functions as a public space in our daily lives, we express ourselves there, I don't think it's good for society for a single company decide this policy unilaterally.
On the other hand, it's good that platforms offer some kind of curation and differentiate themselves based on that. There are YouTube alternatives like Lbry in which practically everything is allowed, and I think both models are necessary.
I must have missed the covenant to not enforce their patents that youtube extends to parties they've deplatformed and the indemnity they offer against the enforcement third party patent rights that they've obtained through cross licensing.
This isn't even a call to violence or targeted harassment. It's the opinion of a man about election results.
So you agree YouTube is perfectly ok to remove content because it mentions 'the opinion of a man about election results.'?
And if Trump was to hypothetically win in 2024, would it be perfectly fine for YouTube to remove any content which is dissenting of Trump? I'm sure a dislike or negative comment would stop that...
There is nothing stopping Trump from creating his own video platform. He is supposedly a billionaire isn’t he?
It's true the large social platforms are privately owned and so they can censor to their hearts content, but given the obliquity and integration these largest platforms have in the social fabric, is that reasonable?
Should they at least have clear moderation policies? It's an issue that needs some hefty discussion and evaluation especially, as we're seeing in this thread, the outsized influence on and control of public discourse they have.
Nothing to do with youtube’s first amendment right, only Section 230 privileges
Lets strip them down to shreds in the public square for not censoring fast enough! Woohoo